Scribble - The Father's Day Delivery
Each year, as June rolls in and the scent of freshly cut grass fills the air, something stirs quietly in the realm between. It starts with a breeze that doesn’t belong to any weather report, a hush that settles in living rooms and pub corners, and the sudden reappearance of a piece of folded card that hadn’t been seen in years.
This is when Scribble returns.
He is a small, soft-spoken ghost with no desire to haunt or frighten. His haunting is of a gentler sort. He carries with him a simple drawing: a square house, a big green tree, and two stick figures smiling under the word "Dad." The colours are faint now, the ink softened by time, but the feeling in the lines remains. A child’s gift. A message never meant to fade.
Scribble does not remember who drew the card first. It is not his own. He never had a child, or even a life as far as anyone knows. But something powerful clung to the paper the first time it was given—a love so enduring, so aching, that it echoed beyond the veil. That love found shape in Scribble.
On Father’s Day, he appears quietly in the places where the absence is loudest. A kitchen where no card sits on the counter this year. A pub stool left respectfully empty. A graveside that hasn’t been visited in a while. Always carrying the same card, always holding it with care, as if it were the most precious artefact in all the worlds.
People who see him don’t feel cold or afraid. They feel... remembered. Like someone noticed the ache they were trying to hide. Scribble doesn’t speak, but sometimes, if the silence is just right, people swear they hear a child’s voice saying, "Happy Father’s Day."
He brings healing in the smallest ways. A pub landlord once found a card like Scribble's tucked behind the bar mirror after seeing the ghost. He left it there. Now, each year, others add their drawings beside it. A wall of love. A chorus of the missing and the missed.
Children who never met their fathers have been known to see Scribble in dreams. In those dreams, the card he holds changes—the house looks like theirs. The stick figures wear familiar clothes. They wake up with a feeling they can’t explain, as if they’d said something important and had it understood.
Scribble is not bound to one place. He drifts where he is needed, a silent courier of memory and connection. A messenger who asks for nothing but offers everything. And though he only appears once a year, the warmth he leaves lingers long after he’s gone.
There are those who try to catch him, to document him, to prove that he is real. But Scribble is a ghost of moments, not science. He isn’t captured in photos or recordings. He exists in the gap between longing and love, in the heartbeat that stutters when you remember.
And every Father’s Day, somewhere, someone opens a drawer or a dusty box and finds a child’s card they were sure they’d lost. Scribble never says it’s from him. He just smiles, and keeps walking.
